Originally Posted by JDR13
I think it's safe to assume that the vast majority of DA:O players can't relate to soloing the game on nightmare.

But it was possible.

Here that pre-alpha footage is pretty much the dev running around in god mode. You even have one using the cheat command to kill everything in the room (and cause the party to reach level 2). It has no relation to how people will ended up playing the game once they balance enemies, encounters and abilities.

So they finally decided to go the full action route? Good. It's just a shame that it still looks like a button masher. If it's adding in rolling and player controlled strikes then why not go the Dark Souls route and add parrying, blocking and different types of attacks (i.e heavy, light, running etc)? What the hell is that hook attack?

"We're trying to get the balance between Origins and DA2…"

And now it looks like neither.

Mind you this is a pre-alpha and what we see is such a short gameplay segment. We'll see how enjoyable it is once a demo releases. At least it doesn't look over the top like it did in DA2 with anime style attacks.

But why use the term "strategical" when that translates to The Witcher 2's "strategical" combat of kiting, rolling and throwing bombs? Mind you this is party-based so while your warrior hits away at a heavily armed opponent with a tower shield you could have your rouge sneak behind them to tackle them down. I suppose that's more strategy and tactics than The Witcher 2's system.

Originally Posted by azarhal
It has no relation to how people will ended up playing the game once they balance enemies, encounters and abilities.

How do you know what the final game is going to play like? People are commenting on that it's starting to look like a real-time action game. I think fans might have a legitimate reason to be concerned.

I don't know why bioware devs are so scared of tactical party based combat. DAO was successful and more recently xcom enemy unknown showed that you can sell a turn based game with success in this day and age. They need to stop trying to do both single player arpg combat coupled with shitty party based combat without a zoomed out tactical view. It's trying to please two different target groups and its going to suck.

Originally Posted by JDR13
How do you know what the final game is going to play like? People are commenting on that it's starting to look like a real-time action game. I think fans might have a legitimate reason to be concerned.

I'm one of the few person here who actually played both DAO and DA2 multiple times and what I saw in that video is no different than what I experienced in those games. The animations and FX are prettier and less comic book than DA2, while the attack speed is faster than DAO was. It looks exactly like what they said, somewhere in between DAO and DA2.

And like I said before, DA2 rogues did roll sometimes in combat and it wasn't player controlled. It was just an animation that played in certain situation when a rogue selected a new target and moved to it or it was caused by using an ability that was animated with a roll. I don't see how seeing a warrior roll around is now a proof that the gameplay is going to be twitch based…

Originally Posted by azarhal
I'm one of the few person here who actually played both DAO and DA2 multiple times and what I saw in that video is no different than what I experienced in those games.

Really? Because I don't remember having full control over swinging a sword, etc., in real time in either of those games, and it sure looks like the player does in that video. Have you even watched it? Or are those parts just not visible through your fanboy goggles?

Originally Posted by JDR13
How do you know what the final game is going to play like? People are commenting on that it's starting to look like a real-time action game. I think fans might have a legitimate reason to be concerned.

You mean more like Gothic or Two Worlds? That would be an interesting direction to go down - probably better than trying to compromise too much.

Originally Posted by JDR13
Really? Because I don't remember having full control over swinging a sword, etc., in real time in either of those games, and it sure looks like the player does in that video. Have you even watched it? Or are those parts just not visible through your fanboy goggles?

The two-handed sword attacks sequence shown in the video is the same as DA2 two-handed auto-attack, the swings are a bit less exaggerated and it's a bit slower, but overall it's the same sequence of animations chaining one after the other. No tapping required here.

The only time the PC is doing something that isn't an auto-attack you can see the low right panel move, that's where the class abilities are (going by what I understand of DA2 ability panel, never played the game on console).

Originally Posted by azarhal
The only time the PC is doing something that isn't an auto-attack you can see the low right panel move, that's where the class abilities are (going by what I understand of DA2 ability panel, never played the game on console).

You can clearly see towards the end of the video, when the player is controlling the female mage, that she's throwing fireballs with each press of the button in real time.

It looked more actioney to me - I think it was the "roll behind the guy with a shield to strike him from behind" moment. It implied twitch combat to me. The massive darkspawn dudes with the shields in the Legacy DLC were a bit like this, but my impression from this video was that they intended to take this twitch element even further this time. But yeah maybe I'm jumping to conclusions (it happens!), so I'll watch for future updates and see how it looks.

Originally Posted by azarhal
You do know that DA2 on consoles have optional auto-attacks, right? They are not optional on the PC, you can't turn them off.

I played it on the xbox - you initially had to press a button for every attack. When I first played it I nearly blew a fuse!! I played as a mage, and was just hammering the button all the time to spam long distance attacks. It was horrific. To be fair, Bioware patched it very quickly (within a week or two I think) to add an auto-attack option, which made it playable.

This is the kind of thing I mean though - the combat can't be all things to all people. I felt the DA2 combat lacked focus by trying to do too many things, and ending up doing none of them particularly well. I hope they have more focus this time.